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Under the 2-mile-thick layer of ice on a desolate, remote plain
in Antarctica lies a lake that has been buried for millennia.
Scientists with the British Antarctic Survey are currently camped
out above that lake, engaged in an effort, years in the making,
to drill down and take water samples from the lake, to see if it
holds any forms of life.

Lake Ellsworth is about 7 miles long, a mile wide and 500 feet
deep (11 kilometers by 1.6 kilometers by 152 meters). Because the
lake has been sealed off by a thick blanket of ice for up to 1
million years — before modern humans evolved — scientists think
microbes or other forms of life in the water could have evolved
in interesting ways to deal with an isolated environment away
from sunlight.

The
plan to drill into Lake Ellsworth involves a specially
designed hot water drill that would bore through the ice and down
to the fresh lake water, and then send 24 titanium canisters down
through the borehole to take water samples. But the plan has hit
a snag.

Technical difficulties

A circuit used in the main boiler that supplies hot water to the
drill has burned out twice. The team is awaiting resupply while
working to understand how to prevent the problem from happening
again.

"We're experiencing some technical difficulties right now that is
preventing us from continuing, at this moment, exploration of the
subglacial lake that lies 3 kilometers beneath our feet," Martin
Siegert, the lead investigator for the project and a glaciologist
at the University of Bristol, said in a Dec. 17 video update on
the project's blog.

Siegert noted that such difficulties are not unusual when
working in Antarctica. "It's a very hostile environment; it's
very difficult to do things smoothly," he said.

While the team is waiting for the new part, it's doing plenty of
other science. This week the researchers have been walking a line
1 km to the northeast and southeast of their camp and taking
samples of snow at regular intervals. The snow will be melted
down and sampled to see what organisms dwell in the snow of the
region. [ Extreme
Antarctica: Amazing Photos of Lake Ellsworth ]

"When we get into the lake itself, we want to know that the
things that we find in it have actually come from the lake, and
not from either the drill fluid or the area around the site,"
explained David Pearce, one of the team's lead scientists, in a
video update from Dec. 18.

Siegert said he hopes the team will be able to resume drilling by
the end of the week and that the good news is that it has plenty
of fuel to continue drilling with.

The harshness of the Antarctic
environment and the complete darkness of winter mean that the
team can be at the site only during the comparatively mild months
of austral spring and summer, from November through January. And
once the team breaches the lake, it will have 24 hours to take
samples before the borehole freezes shut.

Finding microbes

Finding microbes in the frigid, dark waters of the lake could
help scientists better understand the origins of life on our own
planet and the potential environments in which it could arise on
other planets. Even if no signs of life are found in the lake,
that could inform science's understanding of the limits by which
life is bound.

The team also hopes to take samples of mud from the bottom of the
lake, to better understand the geological history of the West
Antarctic Ice Sheet and Earth's past climate.

A group of Russian scientists is drilling down into the waters of
Lake Vostok, the largest of Antarctica's buried lakes. The team
reached the lake's waters during the last drilling season, on
Feb. 5, but the
few microbes it found in the retrieved samples were all
contaminants from the drilling apparatus.